Syntactic Productivity
Syntactic Productivity
Syntactic Productivity
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Summary<br />
88<br />
• The construction highest in type frequency in Icelandic, the Nom-Acc<br />
construction, is the only construction extended beyond its verb-specific<br />
construction, suggesting that it exists as a schematic construction in minds<br />
of speakers<br />
• This assumption is supported by the impression of lower response time for<br />
the participants who categorically assigned the Nom-Acc construction to all<br />
the nonce verbs in the experiment<br />
• Hence, Icelandic speakers assign case and argument structure<br />
constructions to unknown nonce verbs on the basis of (a) synonymous<br />
verb-specific constructions in Icelandic, or (b) high-level schematic<br />
constructions with little or only relational content, yielding default effects<br />
• The results of the experiment also contradict the predictions of generative<br />
grammar that the Dative subject construction should be productive, as it is<br />
not generally extended to nonce verbs construed as emotion verbs.<br />
Bergen Jóhanna Barðdal June 5, 2008
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